Parmenides · Philosophy
Parmenides’ rigorous deduction of the properties Being must have - ungenerated, imperishable, whole, one, continuous, unmoved, and complete ‘like a well-rounded sphere’ - the first systematic attempt to derive the nature of reality by pure logic from a single premise.
Having argued that ‘what is, is’ and that ‘what is not’ is impossible, Parmenides did something no philosopher had done before: he deduced, step by logical step, the complete set of properties that Being must have. These are the ‘signs’ (sēmata) along the Way of Truth - the marks by which true Being is known. And every single one of them follows from the one premise that not-being cannot be. Parmenides thus presents the first fully worked-out example in history of deriving the nature of reality by pure reason, with the relentless rigour of a mathematical proof.
The signs are these. Being is ungenerated - it never came to be, for it could only have arisen from not-being, and there is no not-being to arise from. It is imperishable - it can never cease, for it could only pass into not-being, and there is none. It is one and continuous - undivided, with no gaps, for any gap would be a stretch of not-being. It is unmoved and changeless - for all motion and change require not-being. It is complete and perfect - lacking nothing, ‘like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from the centre in every direction.’ And it is timeless - ‘it was not, nor shall be, but is, now, all at once’ - for past and future involve was and will-be, which are forms of not-now-being. From a single premise, an entire portrait of reality, deduced with airtight logic, and utterly unlike the world we see.
The most famous and beautiful of Parmenides’ signs is his description of Being as ‘complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every direction.’ This image has puzzled and inspired readers for millennia. Parmenides is almost certainly not saying that Being is literally a physical ball floating in space - that would require empty space around it, which he denies. The sphere is a symbol of completeness, perfection, and self-sufficiency. A sphere is the most perfect of shapes: equal in every direction from its centre, without favoured points, lacking nothing, complete in itself. Being, Parmenides says, is like this: complete, lacking nothing, perfectly balanced, self-contained, finished. It does not need anything outside itself (there is nothing outside itself); it is not deficient in any respect (any deficiency would be a failure-to-be, a touch of not-being); it is whole, entire, and perfect.
This idea - that true Being is complete and perfect, lacking nothing - had an immense future in theology and metaphysics. The conception of God as the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect being, lacking nothing, self-sufficient, needing nothing outside itself; the idea of the Absolute as the complete and self-contained totality; the notion that ultimate reality must be perfect precisely because any imperfection would be a kind of non-being - all of these descend from Parmenides’ vision of Being as the well-rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre, complete on every side. He gave Western thought one of its master-images: reality, at its deepest, as a perfect, self-sufficient, complete whole. And he derived even this - even the perfection of Being - from the single relentless premise that not-being cannot be: for to be incomplete, to lack, to be deficient, is to fail to be in some respect, and Being cannot fail to be.
The signs of Being represent something genuinely new in the history of human thought: the first sustained attempt to deduce the nature of reality from a single premise by rigorous logical argument, in the manner of a geometrical proof. Parmenides does not observe Being, or guess at it, or receive it from tradition; he derives it - proves, step by necessary step, that reality must have exactly these properties and no others, on pain of contradiction. This is the birth of metaphysics as a rigorous, demonstrative discipline, and it established a model and an ambition that would echo through the whole history of philosophy: the dream of a complete account of reality, deduced with certainty from self-evident first principles.
That dream runs from Parmenides through Plato’s dialectic, through the deductive systems of the medieval philosophers, and reaches its most spectacular modern form in Spinoza’s Ethics - a complete metaphysics, ethics, and theology presented ‘in the geometrical manner,’ with definitions, axioms, and propositions deduced like the theorems of Euclid, arriving (strikingly) at a single, infinite, eternal, self-complete substance not unlike Parmenides’ One. The method appears again in Hegel’s attempt to deduce the whole structure of reality from the concept of Being, and in every rationalist system that seeks to derive the world from pure thought. Whether or not such systems succeed - and Parmenides’ own conclusions show how a flawless deduction can yield an incredible result - the aspiration they embody, the conviction that reason can penetrate to the necessary structure of reality and prove what must be, is one of the grandest and most characteristic ambitions of Western philosophy, and it begins here, with a goddess in a poem demonstrating, sign by deduced sign, the eternal and perfect nature of all that is.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Parmenides deduced, by pure logic from the impossibility of not-being, that Being must be ungenerated, imperishable, whole, one, continuous, unmoved, and complete - ‘like the mass of a well-rounded sphere.’ Explain the signs of Being and how he derived them in your own words.
Leads to Benedict de Spinoza.
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